Friday essay: foggy, flirty and too much – Jane Austen’s menopausal women solicit compassion while making us laugh

Was Jane Austen the first writer to show how it really feels to be a middle-aged woman?

Before Austen, literature’s iconic perimenopausal woman was the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, who regales the medieval pilgrims with a scandalous account of her five marriages, including the fact she enjoyed sex with her last husband despite a 20-year age gap.

It’s very All Fours (Miranda July’s wildly popular midlife crisis novel from 2024). The Wife of Bath is charismatic and original, but not hugely sympathetic. Then there’s Gertrude in Hamlet, another middle-aged lady with a vibrant sex life and an ambivalent attitude to her adult son.

Micro-portraits of women of a certain age – foggy, tired, rather bad-tempered, with diminishing bone-density, putting on the pounds – are scattered across Jane Austen’s six finished novels.

Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park sits on the sofa all day “thinking more of her pug than her children”. And there’s Mrs Musgrove in Persuasion, whose “large fat sighings” for her dead son, and her tendency to talk too much, amuse Anne Eliot. Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is the most flamboyant of these middle-aged women: irritating but hugely alive and oddly sexy, determined to stay in the game socially, if only by way of her five daughters.

Alongside these vignettes, Austen makes us think about why realist novels, as a genre, resist paying close attention to the uncomfortable transitional period of menopause for women. Why, in other words, so many 18th and 19th-century novels left many of the crucial parts of women’s lives unseen.

‘Menopausal bore’ Miss Bates

Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her …

Austen fans will quickly recognise this passage as Emma Woodhouse’s most shaming moment. Mr. Knightly is scolding Emma after their ill-fated outing to Box Hill, where she has impulsively and cruelly ridiculed their older friend and neighbour, Miss Bates.

Miss Bates is an ordinary middle-aged woman, childless and unmarried. She has very little money and is caring for her “failing mother”. Emma has made a mean joke about Miss Bates being boring. The older woman catches her drift and is flustered and hurt. It’s an excruciatingly recognisable moment in which Emma oversteps the mark to score cheap points and impress the other young people. Mr. Knightly points out, none too compassionately, Emma’s failure of compassion.

But the thing is: Emma’s right. What makes Miss Bates an important character is that she is entirely unimportant, or as Austen tells us early on: “a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married.” Miss Bates is a menopausal bore. But Austen’s brilliant stroke was to make her the moral centre of gravity in Emma.

Miss Bates is a stealth proxy for Austen herself, who was born into a well educated but relatively poor family. She was one of eight children with a clergyman father who had no independent income. Austen knew that without marrying well she would face an adult life of genteel impoverishment, dependent on charity from wealthier brothers. She knew she was headed for Miss Bates’ fate, caring for an ailing mother, with very little money.

I felt a pang for Miss Bates when I first read Emma in my late teens. Now, in middle age, I see a whole life and person in the few scenes Austen gives us. Miss Bates belongs to a cluster of Austen’s characters who are liable to distraction and poor health, who are overwrought and anxious and manage social interactions unskillfully. For many of these women, their children have grown up, their husbands are elderly, or they’re unmarried and childless.

They’re confronting what it will mean to grow old and infirm in Regency England.

But I can see why Emma forgets to feel compassion for Miss Bates and her plight. Novels didn’t generally ask readers to think deeply about these marginal female characters, down on their luck and too old to be interesting to the plot. Indeed, Miss Bates is the kind of character novels discouraged readers from paying much attention to.

The continuing ‘rage for Jane’

It’s the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth this year, and if anything, the rage for Jane has increased. Last year, there was the charming new film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. A Netflix adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is in production, written by Dolly Alderton, and starring Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden (Slow Horses), with Olivia Coleman as Mrs Bennet.

But we’ve stayed fixated on the unlikely couplings and happy endings, overlooking what those endings owe to the women whose stories never take centre stage. When we read Austen’s novels for their stories, we see a densely textured and non-conformist landscape of very different lives and experiences.

Austen paid attention to the women novels had been invented to ignore, allowing readers to see their thoughts far more clearly. She made them relatable, endowing them with the vulnerability that came from us being able to see they wanted things they couldn’t have.

These women often remain at the edges of the action. Miss Bates in Emma, of course. Mrs. Smith in Persuasion, just a few years older than the heroine Anne Elliot, in vastly different circumstances.

Austen makes it clear Mrs. Smith is of no use to a marriage plot, since she is “a widow and poor […] living in a very humble way, unable even to afford herself the comfort of a servant, and of course almost excluded from society.” But again, Austen presents Mrs Smith as worthy of the reader’s attention because of “that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself”, which give her inner strength.

And younger women who don’t fit the patterns and requirements of marriage novels are shown with a complexity usually missing from the genre. Colonel Brandon’s ward Eliza, in Sense and Sensibility, falls pregnant out of wedlock, and Austen encourages readers to feel compassion and understand her situation, although Eliza’s social world has judged her harshly.

Mary Bennet, the least charming and playful sister in Pride and Prejudice, is nerdy, coded as possibly neurodivergent or queer: she avoids social gatherings, studies all the time and takes no pleasure in male company. She’s also called Mary, suggesting an echo with the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote a decade before Austen.

When Lydia describes a fun afternoon riding in the coach, Mary replies dourly,

Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for me.

Austen could have scorned Mary Bennet for being a bluestocking, but instead her vulnerability elicits compassion because she can’t fit in to the social world thrust upon her.

Austen’s capacity to depict vulnerable women clearly, even if only fleetingly, is one of her greatest achievements as a writer. And it’s the moral gravity and visibility of characters on the social and sexual margins of Austen’s novels that gives happier, more normcore characters and stories their heft.

There’s a whole gallery of characters in Austen novels who are NPCs (non-player characters) from the viewpoint of the marriage plots, but who are struggling with many of the same feelings as the main players. Sometimes Austen writes these characters for laughs, but there’s always a moment where we see them laid bare, exposed, wanting something they can’t have, soliciting our compassion.

Mrs. Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, is depicted as erotically alive and probably still quite attractive in her mid 40s – which we know because she’s quite flirty with the young men and socially confident. She’s vulgar and embarrassing, but that’s partly because she has middle-aged desires, which her daughters don’t like.

There’s a moment late in the novel where Lizzie sees that her father exposes her mother to repeated social humiliation by not bothering to help out. Our sense of Mrs. Bennet changes completely. But fascinating as the Bennets’ middle-aged marital dynamic might be, it stays on the margins of the story. Novels were not created to accommodate later-life longings and hormonally driven mood swings.

Solving compassion through novels

The realist novel had come into being precisely to solve the problem of compassion. The premise of novels, which depicted daily life in ways that felt familiar and plausible, trained readers in the social value of feeling adequately and correctly for other people.

Robinson Crusoe (1719) is usually called the first novel in English, and the genre rapidly became a phenomenon. In a Britain with a fast-expanding overseas empire, a rising middle class, rapidly growing cities, new levels of prosperity and widespread leisure, people wanted and needed a popular kind of writing that could show them what ordinary life was like for other people – and what it felt like to be inside another person’s mind and body.

Samuel Richardson achieved this spectacularly with his mid-century novels Pamela and Clarissa, showing with unprecedented intimacy the under-the-skin experience of being a vulnerable young woman in a rigid society where marriage and inheritance counted for everything.

As Ian Watt and countless other literary critics have explained, novels emerged to do the imaginative work philosophers René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume and others had made possible with books such as Essay Concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature. They had explained what human inwardness was and offered a working picture of how humans perceived the world and made social choices and decisions.

The 18th-century novelists Austen learned from (Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe and others) reflected the Enlightenment idea people could know much more about others’ inner lives than in previous eras. By understanding their own and other people’s thoughts and feelings, 18th-century Britons believed, humans could be happier and make better social judgments.

But the realist novel hadn’t been created to pay attention to middle-aged nobodies like Miss Bates. Novels weren’t built to spotlight women on the blurry borders of social hierarchies, who weren’t rich or young or beautiful. Novels were interested in young women and men who could marry, change their social standing, make fortunes and pass their newly created social and financial capital to children.

The menopausal, the hormonally dysregulated, queer characters and anyone else at the margins of social and sexual viability were, quite literally, non-narratable. There were no readymade story arcs for such people in early realist fiction, because in the social ideologies of the day, no story arcs were needed for them.

We see Austen was challenging and questioning the constraints of the novel itself. Even as she perfected the marriage plot, she pushed back against its core assumptions.

It’s Miss Bates who provides the occasion for one of the most moving and important lines in Austen’s oeuvre. Despite her many disadvantages, “she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will”. What Austen is telling us in that unassuming sentence is that women do not need youth or beauty or wealth or good marriages to be happy. They do not, in other words, need marriage plots.

What they need is deep feeling and compassionate curiosity from the people around them – during all the stages of their lives.

Sophie Gee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.